Schumpeter maintained that oscillations of macroeconomic variables are only the "secondary wave" of business cycles, a reflex of more fundamental "primary waves" at the microeconomic level caused by the innovative activity of entrepreneurs. Uniting Schumpeter's concern for innovation with...

Shafer's evidence theory is a branch of the mathematics of uncertain reasoning that allows for novel possibilities to be conceived by a decision-maker. Many of its findings exhibit striking similarities with an alternative decision theory purported by Shackle in the 1950s, before expected...

A simple agent-based model of business units lending money to one another is sufficient to understand on what conditions avalanches of bankruptcies may arise. The model highlights the consequences of specialisation into money lending as well as the impact of preferential lending relations.

The investment acceleration principle is a heuristic for modeling investment time series out of consumption time series. The model presented herein develops a disaggregated accelerator equation whose coefficients are the weights of a Kohonen neural net that represents firms' decision-making....

What are the prospects of B2B electronic commerce when production is carried out by a number of small firms specialized in single production phases? Prato, Italy, is home to thousands of textile firms as well as the locus of an early and innovative experience of a local Internet in the...

This article presents a model of the structure of the information flows that underlie the creation of production chains between thousands of small textile firms located in Prato, central Italy. Contrary to most textile industry of western Europe and north America, Prato did not die out once...

This article presents an agent-based model of an Italian textile district where thousands of small firms specialise in particular phases of fabrics production. It is an empirical model that reconstructs the communications between firms when they arrange production chains. In their turn,...

Agent-based models, an instance of the wider class of connectionist models, allow bottom-up simulations of organizations constituted byu a large number of interacting parts. Thus, geogrfaphical clusters of competing or collaborating firms constitute an obvious field of application. This...

This article provides a cognitive foundation of the parameters that regulate a model of the learning curve. Organizational learning and its actual occurrence are linked to the number of available categories and to the amount of information to be processed.

This article presents a formalization of knowledge based on a connectionist model of a firm's structure. Transaction costs are not ignored, but integrated with the knowledge-based approach. A numerical example on the canonical comparison of "Japanese" versus "American" organizational structures...